Talk:Newton's cradle
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What I don't understand is why it's always the same number of balls at the same acceleration from each side, and not 1/2 the number of balls at twice the acceleration [Hackwrench]
I'm going over http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/cradle.htm , but it's making a mistake of saying speed instead of acceleration/deceleration.
- A purely elastic collision preserves not just momentum, but also kinetic energy in the system, where
. The scenario you describe would end up with twice the mass in motion, but v2 would be a quarter of what it was before, so only half the kinetic energy would remain (the rest of the energy having been converted into other forms, such as sound and heat). This is impossible is a purely elastic scenario, and you will find that the only case preserving both momentum and KE is the one where "the same number of balls" have the same speed before and after the collision.
[edit] Explanation of the Physics?
This article could really do with an explanation of the physics behind this. The first sentence mentions stuff like conservation of momentum and energy, but that doesn't really help to explain how this device works to the layman. I'd write it myself, but I don't know how it works. =P – Lantoka (talk) 03:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Elastic collision
Am I the only one who finds the elastic collision animation so distracting it's almost impossible to read the article? That and many other highly distracting gifs are already on the elastic collision page. Do we really need it here? Kafziel Talk 16:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
